Away from ticking clocks

I take in a deep breath and look around me. I’m sitting in the wonderful Wychwood Forest in rural Oxfordshire and I’m aware that time has a different texture here. Far from ticking clocks, this gentler flow of time stands in stark contrast to my own busy day-to-day experience of it.

As I perch here quietly on a fallen log I feel a gentle internal shift towards organic time. It is a peaceful summer’s day in the forest, the sun shining through the oak and beech canopy. I sense that the course of seasons is slowly turning and if I sat here long enough the leaves would begin to fall around me. I’m aware of the buzzing life of summer insects. Around me the imperceptible, patient growth and decay of these oaks and beeches. I look up in wonder knowing that many of these trees were here before my grandparents were born.

This ancient forest lives on a different rhythm to my humdrum schedules and it is only in lingering here that I open up to it. Even my breathing slows and in tuning into nature’s rhythm I find a greater sense of perspective.

Beside my bed is a book, ‘Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals’ by Oliver Burkeman, named because that is the span of an ordinary lifetime. In it he says, “The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”

At ITF we care deeply about the functional benefits of trees, such as their ability to improve watersheds, their capacity to store atmospheric carbon and their importance in sustaining livelihoods. Yet alongside those benefits we also appreciate the need to step away from our clocks and leave space for wonder – woodlands and forests are bursting with it.

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